Table of Contents
Title Page
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Starstruck
Rachel Schurig
Copyright © 2015 Rachel Schurig
All rights reserved.
Kindle Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
To find out more about her books, visit Rachel at rachelschurig.com
Join the mailing list for updates and exclusive content!
Visit her author page on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/RachelSchurigAuthor)
Follow her on Twitter (https://twitter.com/rems330)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Huge thanks to Shelley Holloway for your help, advice, and patience.
www.hollowayhouse.me
Thanks once again to Scarlett Rugers for a beautiful cover.
www.scarlettrugers.com
Lastly, thank you so much Reagan! Your help and support was much appreciated. Readers like you make my job amazing!
Chapter One
You know when you’re trying not to think about someone and suddenly you start seeing them everywhere? Like how you always run into your ex at the grocery store on the one day you didn’t put on any makeup or bother to change out of your yoga pants?
Now imagine that the person you’re trying not to think about happens to be the most famous movie star on the planet.
Try avoiding that.
My sigh was loud enough to make the sleeping baby in my arms stir, but—thank God—not wake up entirely. I pressed Beth into me a little closer, inhaling her sweet baby scent, trying to convince myself that I had done the right thing. It would have been crazy to pursue something with any guy, let alone a guy like Jackson Coles, so soon after becoming a single mother. Sending Jackson away had been my only option, really. It was better for my daughter this way, better for me. He wasn’t right for our lives. I knew that.
I just wished he would stop showing up on my damn TV.
I didn’t fully relax until the commercial ended. He was going to be on one of the late shows that evening, apparently. Not like I cared. Not like I would be recording it.
I would totally be recording it.
Beth stirred again, stretching her tiny little hands out over her head, and my heart melted, all thoughts of Jackson Coles and his gorgeous, movie-star face vanishing from my head. I wasn’t quite used to that phenomenon yet—the way Beth could completely wipe my mind clean of any concern, any worry, just by moving. She would curl up tighter in my arms, and my heart would melt. She would smile or grab my finger or focus her tiny, bright brown eyes on mine, and the entire world would disappear. She would cry, and all of my attention would focus on her with laser-like intensity—the house could burn down around me and I wouldn’t notice. My cousin Lizzie, my best friend in the world, said I had developed a habit of dropping out of a conversation mid-sentence when Beth would make the smallest move or noise. I told her she was full of it.
She definitely was not.
“It’s okay, though,” Lizzie had assured me, leaning over my shoulder to get a closer look at the baby. “She’s pretty perfect. Who could blame you?”
She was perfect, and I really don’t think I was just saying that as a biased, first-time mom. She had the most gorgeous baby skin, pink and soft, just begging me to run my fingers gently over her cheeks. Her deep brown eyes, my eyes, were surrounded by lashes so dark and long that they almost looked fake. What baby had eyes like that? And, true to family tradition, she already had a full head of thick, dark hair.
Had her father not been such an asshole, I would feel a bit bad that she took so clearly after my side of the family.
I frowned at the thought of Jim. He was another one I was trying not to think about. Somehow, it was easier to keep my mind off him, even though I had a living, breathing reminder of our misguided affair right here in my arms. Even though I saw him, in person, not on the TV, on a semi-regular basis. Still, it was easier to go long hours without once thinking of him, sometimes even days.
Jackson, on the other hand…
My cell phone buzzed on the coffee table in front of me, and I reached for it, without jostling the baby awake. I had become an expert at getting things accomplished one-handed when holding her. A glance at the screen told me the caller was Lizzie, and I quickly pressed the answer button.
“Hey,” she said, her voice cautiously quiet. “Sleeping baby nearby?”
I loved her for thinking of Beth first. I had learned in the first four months of motherhood that my favorite people were the ones who seemed as interested in my daughter as I was.
“She’s right here,” I told her, my voice equally quiet as I looked down at the sleeping baby in my arms.
“You know I can hear you go all gooey and smiley when you look at her, right?” Lizzie asked.
I snickered. “I’m not even going to pretend that you’re wrong.”
“So how’s she doing? Sleeping any better?”
“Much better these last few days, thankfully.” The last time Lizzie and I had talked, Beth had been in the middle of a weeklong phase of refusing to sleep at night. The lack of sleep had been severe enough to make me question my sanity. I’m pretty sure I spent most of that conversation with Lizzie crying hysterically—it was all a bit of a blur, buried under the haze of exhaustion.
That was another thing that was difficult to get used to—my memory was awful these days. At least, that was the explanation I was giving myself to feel better about how often an entire day would pass without me taking the time to shower or put on real clothes. Forgetfulness seemed like a better excuse than admitting I was overwhelmed. Admitting I was overwhelmed meant admitting I needed more help. I wasn’t ready to go there, even in my own head.
“I’m glad,” Lizzie said, snatching my attention away from where it had wandered to thoughts of how nice a hot shower would feel. “I was thinking I would have to come home early just to hold her at night so you could get some rest.”
Her words made my chest clench. She hadn’t been home in several weeks, and I missed the hell out of her. But I didn’t tell her that—we tried to avoid overt sappiness as a general rule. Besides, she’d be home soon enough. Next month, if I was remembering correctly. But, to be honest, I wasn’t entirely sure what day it even was. I laughed to cover the ache of missing her. “Like there’s any shortage of people around here willing to hold her.”
“Like you’re so good at taking help from any of them,” she countered, and I couldn’t argue.
I sighed, my earlier worries suddenly once again fresh in my mind. Without saying a word, my cousi
n seemed to sense the shift in my mood.
“You’re stressing about work,” she said.
“Of course I am, Lizzie. I have no idea what I’m going to do.”
“Sof.” She sighed, too, suddenly sounding far away, the distance between Detroit and London seeming unbearable. “I think you’re going to have to consider letting your mom watch her.”
“That’s not an option.”
She ignored the sharpness of my voice. “It is an option. Maybe not the one you want, but it’s there.”
I closed my eyes and leaned my head back against the top of the couch, trying to keep from losing my temper. I had been getting more and more frustrated by my lack of options for weeks. Lately, anytime I had thought about the end of my maternity leave, I had felt like throwing something. And since the only things within reach were my baby and my expensive smart phone—a pre-motherhood purchase back when I had the luxury of spending money—I knew I needed to control the urge.
“Look, I know how you feel about it,” Lizzie was saying, her voice calm and matter-of-fact. “I know it makes you uncomfortable to take their help—”
“I’m already taking their help,” I snapped. “I live in their house, and I eat their food.”
“They’re your family,” she said firmly. “They’re thrilled you’re there—both of you.”
I knew she was right. After finding out I was pregnant, my parents had reacted exactly the way I thought they would—they flipped the hell out. Even though I was an adult, twenty-four years old for God’s sake, they had gone on and on about the impropriety of it, about what the family would think, what the church would think. Twenty minutes of my mother’s tears, of the horrified, heartbroken look on my dad’s face, had been enough to send me straight to Lizzie’s, where I lived with her and her fiancé Thomas for most of my pregnancy. It wasn’t until much later that I had finally accepted my parents’ profuse apologies and moved back home, just in time for Beth to be born.
It was hard to forget the hurt of that first reaction. There were times when my mother held my daughter, and I felt the strangest urge to scream, to rip Beth away. What right did they have to hold her, to love her, when they had been so negative about her conception? But then I would inevitably think about how scared and sad I myself had been in those early weeks after the lines on the test turned pink, and the anger quickly gave way to guilt.
“Sofie,” Lizzie was saying in that same calm and neutral voice that was so foreign in our family of passionate yellers. “Letting your mom watch Beth during the day isn’t going to hurt anyone. You know she’ll take great care of her—”
“Of course I know that.”
And I did. My mother loved children. And there were always plenty of children around in our crazy, loud, oversized family. Growing up, I never experienced a shortage of playmates. From my own sister to my cousins, half cousins, second cousins, and countless kids from church, there were always kids around. And my mom loved on them all, never happier than when she was snuggling a baby or bustling around the kitchen, preparing meals and snacks for whatever relatives or friends happened to be in the house at the time. There were a lot of things I could say about my family—too loud, too bossy, way too interested in each other’s business—but there was no arguing that they were loving.
But that didn’t mean that I wanted to make her Beth’s primary caregiver, forty-five hours a week.
“Then what’s the issue?”
I blew out a huff of air, trying to find the words to articulate how uncomfortable the idea made me. “Lizzie, you went halfway across the world to gain your independence. I… I’m stuck here. Taking help from everyone. I need there to be one thing I can do for Beth on my own. I need to be able to provide for her.”
“Taking help from family doesn’t mean you’re providing any less.”
“Yeah, but it does mean that I give up a hell of a lot of control.”
Lizzie was quiet for a long moment. “I guess I can understand that.”
“You know how they are, Lizzie,” I said, glancing toward the kitchen doorway as if to double-check that my mom hadn’t magically reappeared in the house three hours early. “I promised myself the day I moved back in here that I wasn’t ever going to let Beth be controlled the way that I was. The way that we both were.”
I heard her sigh on the other end. Out of everyone I knew, it was Lizzie who would understand this fact about our family—that I could love them more than just about anyone in the world, that I could understand their beliefs and the way they tried to order and control the world around them through their traditions and their expectations. But despite loving them, despite understanding how they felt and why, I couldn’t shake the deep desire I felt to make things different for my own daughter.
“I get it,” she said, her voice soft and resigned. “I guess I would feel the same way if our positions were reversed.”
“Yeah, considering how you moved across an ocean to get away from your family, I figured you would.”
“I didn’t move to get away from them,” she argued. “I didn’t move to get away from anything. I moved to get to the thing I wanted.”
I felt myself deflate. That was the problem right there. Lizzie knew exactly what she wanted, she always had. I, on the other hand, had never quite been able to figure it out. I was relatively sure that had it not been for Beth, I would have been content enough to live right here for the rest of my life. I would have married another boy from a Hispanic family that my parents knew, settled in this neighborhood, gone to the same church, and had family dinners at the Medina’s every week with my aunts and uncles and cousins. I would have been comfortable, just like my sister and Lizzie’s sisters before me.
But then, Beth came along and changed all of that. Suddenly, happy enough wasn’t good enough. For Beth, I wanted more.
“Have you had any luck with daycare?” Lizzie asked, sensing that I needed a subject change. Unfortunately, this topic did little to improve my mood.
“Nope. Every place halfway decent is way too expensive to afford on my salary.”
“What about Jim?”
“What about him?”
I had to give Lizzie credit—she didn’t seem at all put off by the obvious bite in my voice. “Why isn’t he helping you to pay for daycare? Isn’t that part of child support?”
“We haven’t figured out child support yet,” I said, closing my eyes again. I knew Lizzie was just trying to help, but she was forcing me to think about the very things that had been making me so overwhelmed for weeks. I didn’t want to meet with Jim to discuss childcare because I didn’t want to address what role he would play in our daughter’s life. And I didn’t want to think about leaving my baby with my mother or finding daycare because none of those options seemed good enough. And the idea of leaving her at all, the idea that after four months of spending every waking minute with her, I would have to go back to that shitty job in that shitty office and not see her whenever I—
“Damn it,” I muttered, squeezing my eyes tighter, fighting against the tears.
“Sof.” Lizzie’s voice was full of pity, and it somehow made me feel even worse. “Why don’t you come over here and stay with me for a while? We can take care of Beth together, you know? It would be awesome.”
“I’m supposed to be going back to work.”
“So you take a few more weeks. That’s what the maternity care extension is worth.”
“I’ve already been taking the extension for the last two months. It doesn’t pay anything, Lizzie.”
“Yeah, but if you stay with us, you don’t have to worry about any of that yet.”
“So instead of sponging off of my parents, I would be sponging off of your husband?”
She was quiet. “I bring in money, too, you know.”
I winced. “I didn’t mean it like that. I just—”
“I know you don’t like the idea of becoming beholden to anyone,” she said. “I get that. I had a very hard time dealing with T
homas’s money at first.”
“So you see why I can’t just move to London for a few months and hang out in your house and not contribute. You don’t like the idea of not contributing, and he’s your husband. He’s just my cousin-in-law.”
“He’s your family.” Her voice was sharp. “So am I.”
Beth grunted softly in her sleep, and I focused my attention on her, taking deep breaths, wishing the growing panic away.
“I know that you’re trying to help. I know that I can’t ignore the situation forever. I just… I can’t right now, okay? I’m not ready to make a choice, not yet.”
Lizzie was silent for a long moment. “Then let’s change the subject,” she finally said, her voice bright. I knew she was pretending not to be worried about me for my sake, and I loved her for it. “We can talk about this more when I get home.”
“Thank you. Tell me something exciting about your glamorous life in London.”
She snorted. “We started renovating the dining room. My entire house smells like turpentine, and my fingers are pretty much permanently stained red.”
“I bet it looks great, though,” I pointed out. “The kitchen and living room looked amazing.”
I had only seen Lizzie’s house once, when we all went to London for her wedding. I had been six months pregnant at the time and way more jealous than I could ever admit about her perfect husband and her perfect, lovingly restored old house. I blamed it on the hormones, not wanting to believe that I could be so small as to actually be jealous of my cousin, my best friend—
“Oh, we had the wrap party for Darkness the other night,” she said, as if just remembering. “I guess that was kind of glamorous.”
Did I say I couldn’t be jealous of Lizzie? Yeah, that was total BS.
“Kind of? Kind of glamorous? The wrap party for the most highly anticipated movie of the next year. With legitimate celebrities. And catering. And paparazzi. And a swanky hotel ballroom—”
“It was at a club,” she corrected, sounding amused. “And it was kind of boring.”
Starstruck (Lovestruck Book 4) Page 1
